The Book Barge Purveyor of private libraries | Atelier De Bibliotheques Privees

A treat revisiting the Thames today for an interview (and early morning mudlark) with London in Fragments author Ted Sandling. Ted’s been treasure hunting on the foreshore on and off since 2004, and instagrams his finds at london_mudlark. The book this has spawned is a…

A 6km cycle ride from Bruges is Damme, Belgium’s ‘book town’. Visit on a Sunday and you’re treated to the weekly book fair in the market place, where we accumulated a couple of old guide books, a paperback of US sea shanties and a Johnny…

This is our €15 per night pied-à-terre in the centre of, I’m certain, the prettiest place I’ve ever visited with the boat. The plan was to stay a few days. Then a month. The current thinking is to forget the Burgundy build altogether and remain…

Please excuse the longish blog absence, which we’ve productively spent getting married and moseying down south and out to sea. Last Monday, six weeks after setting off (on our wedding night no less, and still in nuptial garb as the pic above attests) we finally…

The shop gets a lovely six-page feature in this month’s Country Living, although, rather alarmingly, within a section of the magazine purporting to give small business advice. Not quite as questionable as Amazon once sandwiching The Bookshop that Floated Away between The Wolf of Wall…

The Book Barge’s move to France is now horribly close. We’ll be making our slow chug south from the start of April, taking canals to Oxford and then switching onto the Thames, heading up as far as navigation allows, and then retracing our wake all…

Lots of people have been asking about the book that I/Tim West read from on C4’s Great Canal Journeys last Sunday. It’s Maidens’ Trip by Emma Smith. The extract was taken from fairly near the beginning, and describes the “second little life of withdrawal” she…

I had the pleasure to meet and interview fellow boater Kevin Duckham for Waterways World magazine recently. Having been given a cancer diagnosis in August, his first reaction was to buy a 45ft narrowboat called Daydream and plan a crazy trip that should have taken…

Thanks to all the people who discovered The Book Barge last week when it appeared on C4’s Amazing Spaces show with George Clarke – and promptly wrote to me voicing their toilet concerns. If you missed the sh**ter, there’s still time to enjoy its hobbit…

It seems we were a bit optimistic about the re-paint re-opening day… Three weeks later, it’s still a WIP. Various people have pointed out the relatively small brush (pictured) for the 60ft length as a contributing factor. To which I say: ‘gah’. We will *almost…